Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

The Local Food and Farming Revolution
by Michael Brownlee
http://transition-times.com/2010/03/08/the-local-food-and-farming-revolution/
Mar 08, 2010


[Note: This presentation was developed for the Colorado Agriculture "Big and 
Small" Conference in Brighton, Colorado, on Feb. 26, 2010]

Before I get into the presentation, a few words about where I’m coming from. 
As it happens, I grew up in a little farming community in northeastern 
Colorado—Yuma—where my family owned the local drug store (complete with soda 
fountain).

I’m a journalist and communicator at heart, and I started working for the 
local newspaper in Yuma when I was in the sixth grade. I watched the 
landscape and the town change with deep changes in agriculture.

For nearly the last five years I’ve been working on relocalization in Boulder 
County and more recently across the state, working towards our communities 
being able to meet their essential needs locally, and in the process to 
become more resilient and self-reliant.

To begin this presentation, I’m going to give the briefest possible summary I 
can of the situation, our potential response, and what’s possible—maybe five 
minutes—then back it up with some details. Then I’ll talk about the 
involvement of the Transition movement in food and agriculture, along with 
some of the things we’re working on in Boulder County. Afterwards, I hope we 
can discuss all this together for a little while.

I’m probably going to step on a few landmines here, maybe break some taboos. 
But I ask for your patience.

Here’s my quick, thumbnail sketch of the situation, the highly condensed 
version:

Because the way we eat and the way we grow our food is a major contributor to 
climate change and global warming…

Because industrial food production is so energy-intensive and so dependent on 
oil for fertilizer, pesticides, planting and harvesting, processing, 
packaging, and transportation…

Because global oil production likely peaked in July 2008, which means that 
energy will be increasingly expensive in the future…

Because the age of cheap fossil fuels has come to an end…

Because the economy has been based on an abundant supply of cheap fossil 
fuels…

Because therefore food prices will soon increase dramatically, and food 
shortages will begin to happen—even here—perhaps in the next couple of years…

Because the U.S. is becoming a net food importer…

Because humanity is now consuming more food than we are producing…

Because industrial agriculture—like the globalized economy—is at a crossroads 
and is about to go into an unexpected decline…

Because much of the food that industrial agriculture produces is destroying 
our national’s health …

Because the way we grow much of our food is destroying and washing away our 
precious topsoil…

Because we can no longer conscionably support a food system that causes 
hunger, starvation, and disease in other parts of the world…

Because the way we eat is destroying our connection with the earth, with the 
natural processes and cycles of earth and sky, with those who grow our food, 
with the essence of life…

Because the way we eat has seriously weakened our communities…

Because maybe less than one percent of our current diet is local…

Because in Colorado we spend more than ten billion dollars on food each year, 
almost all of which is fleeing outside the state, lost to our local economies…

And because we know all this…

We must learn everything we can about our food predicament. We must all learn 
to grow at least some of our own food. We must all support the revitalization 
of local agriculture. We must end our dependence on fossil fuels, chemical 
fertilizers, and mechanization in our food production. We must commit to 
healing and rebuilding the soil everywhere we can. We must dramatically 
increase local food production for local consumption.

We must rebuild the local food infrastructure for processing and 
distribution. We must stop supporting and consuming non-local food. We must 
support local farmers, local producers, local grocers, and local restaurants.

We must learn how to eat seasonally. We must learn how to preserve and store 
food. We must plan how we’re going to build food security in our communities, 
and plan how we’re going to feed our people when things get tough. We must be 
prepared to share what we have to eat.

We must develop new skills and knowledge—composting, vermiculture, 
permaculture, soil-building, seed-saving, cultivating, canning and 
preserving, cooking, nutrition planning, herbal medicine.

We must make our foodshed as local as possible.

And we must do all this rather quickly.

If all this sounds like hard work, well, it is! But what would happen if we 
did this?

Our health would improve greatly, especially the health of our children. We’d 
feel more connected, more alive, more engaged, living more meaningful and 
more satisfying lives. We’d be devoted to rebuilding the soil in our 
farmlands. Our local farmers would be able to buy the land on which they 
farm. We’d transform the landscape. Our agricultural land would mostly be 
used for food production for local consumption. We’d produce thousands of new 
jobs; our local economies would be robust! We’d dramatically reduce 
greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation. We’d be sequestering 
carbon in the soil, in plant growth. We’d have plans and food stores in place 
to feed all our people in times of crisis or emergency. We’d all have a far 
greater degree of food security and food sovereignty; major corporations 
would no longer be in control of what and how we eat. Our foodshed would be 
resilient and self-reliant.

This would be a revolution!

     The Food and Farming Predicament

Okay, now let me back up and go into a little more depth.

We face a daunting predicament with the way we’re producing and consuming our 
food. We could frame the heart of our predicament around a key concept that 
we’re all learning about these days: sustainability. Now, mostly we’ve been 
forced into learning about sustainability because modern industrial 
agriculture has some real problems here, and these have kind of crept up on 
us. We didn’t see all this coming, but here’s some of what we’ve been 
discovering (of course, most of you already know these things; I’m just 
trying to put it into some kind of context):

First, industrial agriculture is having serious and unexpected environmental 
impacts: fertilizer runoff has created dead zones in our oceans; the search 
for more arable land has devastated our forests; irrigation methods have 
depleted surface and ground water; the way we farm is eroding our topsoil and 
reducing soil fertility; pesticides and herbicides have polluted our air and 
water; monocropping has resulted in loss of habitat for many species.

And agriculture has become a major contributor to climate change. If we 
consider the manufacture and use of pesticides and fertilizers; fuel and oil 
for tractors, equipment, trucking and shipping; electricity for lighting, 
cooling, and heating; and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide 
and other green house gases—the total impact of farming and food production 
may be between 25 and 30 percent of the U.S.’s collective carbon footprint.

If we add to this the carbon sequestration that is lost every year through 
deforestation to increase land for agricultural use, the total contribution 
of industrial agriculture to climate change is simply enormous.

At the same time, it seems that much of the food we have been producing has 
actually been decreasing in quality. Food is too cheap! We spend only 10% of 
our income to feed ourselves; we don’t value food enough. We’ve seen an 
epidemic of obesity and malnutrition (in Boulder County, 49% of our residents 
are overweight or obese), along with a dramatic increase in chronic 
food-related diseases and food-borne illnesses.

These impacts are serious enough, but may not even be the most significant 
impacts of industrial agriculture. We’ve also witnessed the loss of the web 
of connections at the heart of our society. Our towns and cities do not 
function as communities any more. People are disconnected from food, from the 
people who grow it, and from the land. There is a profound lack of public 
awareness of environmental costs and health consequences of processed foods. 
Rural economies have been left in shambles, as agricultural outputs are 
shipped to distant markets. Our communities can no longer feed themselves.

At the same time, on top of all this, there is a growing global food crisis 
that is symptomatic of our predicament. In the last couple of years, we’ve 
seen runaway inflation of food prices, growing inequities in the availability 
of food staples, food riots in at least 30 nations, and scientists calling 
for a moratorium on biofuel production.

The food crisis is also local. In 2008, we witnessed 40,000 people show up at 
the Miller Farm by Platteville when they opened their fields for gleaning. 
Hunger is on the increase even in America, and it’s extending well into the 
middle class. Poorer families often have to choose between food, medical 
care, or heat. They just can’t afford them all.

     The Coming “Perfect Global Storm”

Gleaning at Miller Farm

Most of us know in our bones that a sea change is coming in agriculture. But 
the biggest driver of that change is not going to come from the issues that 
I’ve mentioned so far.

The biggest driver is going to be the increasing cost and decreasing 
availability of fossil fuels, especially oil. Because agriculture is so 
dependent on oil, the entire system is extremely vulnerable to oil 
depletion—and to oil price spikes.

The situation brewing on the horizon regarding oil compels us to begin 
rethinking how we grow our food, and even how we eat.

The application of fossil fuels to the food system has supported a human 
population growing from fewer than two billion in 1990 to nearly seven 
billion today. In the process, the way we feed ourselves has changed 
profoundly.

The population is expected to grow to about nine billion by the middle of 
this century, and there is great concern about how we’re going to feed all 
those people. The system is already straining to keep up.

What’s not on the radar of most people—including governments and industry—is 
that our supply of cheap oil on which we all depend (most especially in 
agriculture) is shrinking.

We’ve likely already reached the peak of global oil production, and are 
facing an irreversible decline rate that will be somewhere between three and 
nine percent per year. We’re at the tipping point right now.

So, the bottom line is not good news: Oil is going to become increasingly 
scarce and increasingly expensive over time—beginning very soon. This will 
fundamentally change how we farm and how we eat, and the local food and 
farming revolution is in many ways an attempt to anticipate and prepare for 
what’s inevitably coming.

Of course, it’s not just farming that’s going to be impacted, because our 
entire globalized economy is based on an abundant supply of fossil fuels, 
especially oil. The economic downturn we’ve recently experienced is directly 
related to this dynamic. In 2008, oil rose to $147/barrel, precipitating a 
global recession, and we’re still reeling from it.

There are now 98 oil producing nations in the world—and at least 64 of them 
have already reached their peak in oil production and are in decline. That is 
fundamentally why oil prices have been rising so dramatically.

Yes, it’s true that there is a bit more oil to be discovered and developed 
and produced in various parts of the world. But oil discoveries peaked 
globally around 1960, and have fallen off dramatically despite plenty of 
investment in exploration. We’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit, 
the easy inexpensive oil. From here on in, oil is going to be increasingly 
expensive and harder to get out of the ground. All the cheap oil has already 
been burned.

And in a way, this is a very good thing. Because if we had unlimited 
quantities of cheap oil to burn, and continued doing so, we would quickly 
overwhelm the atmosphere with carbon to the point that it would be very 
difficult to grow anything anywhere. Climate change at that level would be 
devastating to all life on this planet.

Peak oil is an enormous predicament. Our ability to grow food to feed our 
population has been based on cheap fossil fuels. In fact, our entire global 
economy is based on cheap fossil fuels. And now we’re bumping into a very 
fundamental resource limitation that will force us to change how we do almost 
everything. Worse, though most economists don’t want to consider this yet, 
peak oil signals the end of economic growth. We are learning that economic 
growth as we have known it is profoundly unsustainable.

The implications for food and agriculture are staggering, and they are 
urgent. Last year, the Soil Association in the UK published a key paper, 
“Food Futures: Strategies for resilient food and farming.” In that document, 
they say:

    “Over the next 20 years we must make fundamental changes to the way we 
farm, process, distribute, prepare and eat our food. Global food shortages 
will be inevitable unless we act now to change our food and farming systems.”

One of the key researchers in this area is Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at 
Post Carbon Institute, author of a number of important books that have helped 
us understand our predicament. Last year, he co-authored a very important 
paper, which I highly recommend to you, “The Food & Farming Transition: 
Toward a Post Carbon Food System.” Here he maps the pathways to a much-needed 
revolution in agriculture.

Richard is one of the most grounded and most incisive researchers and 
communicators in the world regarding these issues. I’ve come to deeply trust 
his perspective and his insights. In a paper titled, “What Will We Eat When 
the Oil Runs Out?,” Richard says,

    “To get to the heart of the crisis, we need a more fundamental reform of 
agriculture than anything we have seen in many decades. In essence, we need 
an agriculture that does not require fossil fuels…”

A non-fossil-fuel agricultural system! Well, the situation we’re facing does 
mandate radical changes. Heinberg continues:

    “The transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a 
distant utopian proposal. It is an unavoidable, immediate, and immense 
challenge that will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels 
of society.”

This is all part of a convergence of global crises—fossil fuel depletion, 
climate change, and economic turmoil—which James Howard Kunstler has called 
“The Long Emergency.” We need to understand that The Long Emergency is not a 
problem that can be solved. It is a predicament, a long-term consequence of 
our own actions to which we must now adapt.

Now, at first this might all sound like a disaster. But it doesn’t have to 
be. It might turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to food and 
agriculture.

Albert Bates, author of The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, says

    “The Long Emergency is an opportunity to pause, to think through our 
present course, and to adjust to a saner path for the future. We had best 
face facts: we really have no choice. The Long Emergency is a horrible 
predicament. It is also a wonderful opportunity to do a lot better. Let’s not 
squander this moment.”

As Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition movement, says:

    “Inherent within the challenges of peak oil and climate change is an 
extraordinary opportunity to reinvent, rethink and rebuild the world around 
us.”

In the face of all this, one of the most important things we can do—and must 
do—is to completely rebuild our local foodsheds—from multiplying backyard and 
frontyard gardens, to converting our local agricultural lands to growing food 
for local consumption, to rebuilding local food storage and distribution 
systems, to training people to learn farming as a wise and essential—and 
sustainable—career choice.

Not only will all this help reduce the amount of fossil fuels embedded in 
today’s food from fertilizer, pesticides and transport, but adopting a more 
local organic diet will greatly contribute to our health, and our children’s 
health. It will also reconnect us with those who grow our food, with the land 
that supports and nurtures us, with the seasons, and with the natural 
processes and cycles that are fundamental to all life. In the process, we’ll 
rediscover what community really means. And for most of us, that will be an 
unexpected and inspiring revelation.

Of course, what I’m pointing to here are qualities of sustainability that 
can’t be measured, but which we know in our hearts are essential to 
humanness—qualities and experiences that have been lost to our communities 
for a long time.

This means that we have no choice but to quickly transition to a world no 
longer dependent on fossil fuels, a world made up of communities and 
economies that function within ecological limits. The age of economic growth 
driven by cheap fossil fuels is over.

And the age of agriculture driven by cheap fossil fuels is over, too.

The Worldwatch Institute recently published its report, 2010 State of the 
World: Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability. In this 
book, in an article titled “From Agriculture to Permaculture,” Albert Bates 
and Toby Hemenway (both farmers and teachers of Permaculture) say:

    “Humanity now confronts a critical challenge: to develop methods of 
agriculture that sequester carbon, enhance soil fertility, preserve ecosystem 
services, use less water, and hold more water in the landscape—all while 
productively using a steadily compounding supply of human labor. In short, a 
sustainable agriculture.”

Another perspective is from Sharon Astyk, a farmer and mother and writer. In 
her latest book, A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American 
Soil, she writes:

    “Oil has replaced people in industrial agriculture, and now people have 
to come back and replace the oil.”

Sharon calls for a food and farming revolution that is based on simply 
choosing to change the nature of what we grow and what we eat.

    “It is a call for more participation in the food system—100 million new 
farmers and 200 million new cooks in the U.S., and many more worldwide.”

Agriculture is entering into a profound transition, and fundamentally it’s an 
energy transition that will be unfolding over the next 10 to 15 years—and 
there probably will be some pretty big bumps along the way. We will have less 
available energy in the future. And renewables will not be able to come on 
stream quickly enough or at sufficient scale to avoid fairly drastic changes.

The opportunity we have is to design our descent down this energy curve. Now, 
the transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take some time. Nearly 
every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned.

But if we do this right, we have an opportunity to build a food and farming 
system that is economically viable, environmentally sustainable, resilient 
and self-reliant, that ensures food security and sovereignty for all, that 
contributes to the health and happiness of our citizenry, and that 
revitalizes our communities across the nation.

If we do this right, as Sharon Astyk says:

    “Not only can we cease to do the harm that industrial agriculture does, 
but we can replace it with something better—a better way of growing and 
preparing food—and also a democracy of the sort that Thomas Jefferson 
imagined for his nation, a democracy that is not vulnerable to being stolen 
or sold, as our present one is.”

     The Transition Movement

While you’re digesting that, I now want to shift gears for a moment and tell 
you a little about the Transition movement.

In the fall of 2004, in Kinsale, Ireland—the oldest town in that country—Rob 
Hopkins was teaching the world’s first two-year Permaculture course at a 
community college there. On the first day of class, he did two things that 
rocked his world, and his students’, and which led to the birth of an 
international movement that is focused on designing our way down the energy 
descent curve.

The first thing Rob did was to show a brand new documentary film to his 
class, “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American 
Dream.” Has anyone here seen it? The film lays out the coming oil crisis in 
very compelling terms, and for many it comes as quite a shock at first—as it 
did for Rob and his students.

The other thing he did was to invite a guest speaker into the class, Colin 
Campbell, a highly-respected petroleum geologist who happened to live just up 
the road from the college. Campbell spent decades working for some of the 
biggest oil companies in the world, and he founded the Association for the 
Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). Well, Campbell pushed Rob over the edge with his 
analysis. Here’s a brief sample:

    “The second half of the Age of Oil now dawns and will be marked by the 
decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital. It 
heralds the collapse of the present financial system, and the related 
political structures… I am speaking of a second Great Depression.”

As Rob and his students explored the implications of what they had seen and 
heard, they began considering how vulnerable the town of Kinsale was to the 
coming energy shocks, and economic shocks, and even food shocks. Rob had the 
insight that it might be possible to apply the principles and ethics of 
Permaculture to design a plan for the community to transition off of fossil 
fuel dependence, learn how to meet its essential needs locally, and in the 
process become more resilient and self-reliant. Designing such a plan became 
a very ambitious class project.

As they took it on, they envisioned what a truly sustainable Kinsale would 
look like, set a target of the year 2021, and through a process of 
backcasting began figuring out what would need to happen each year to get to 
that goal.

They did an impressive job, and put it into an historical document, the 
Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan. In fact, they did such a good job with 
this that the town council adopted their plan as the plan for the town of 
Kinsale, and that plan is being implemented there today.

This experience got Rob Hopkins thinking. In fact, it got a lot of us 
thinking, who were looking at the coming challenges, as we were here in 
Colorado, watching what was going on in Kinsale. Rob saw that it might just 
be possible to use the principles and ethics of Permaculture to empower whole 
communities—even entire cities—to enter into an inspirational community-wide 
process together to design their own energy descent plans and become 
resilient and self-reliant.

In 2006, he began prototyping that process in Totnes, England in 2006. And 
now the Transition process he developed there is being replicated—more or 
less officially—in more than 280 communities in 16 nations. And informally, 
there are at least another 2,000 communities who are experimenting with the 
process. Transition is a bottom-up, grassroots-to-grasstops movement that is 
rapidly expanding, and generating enormous interest and enthusiasm around the 
world.

Hopkins’ book, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependence to Local 
Resilience, published in March 2008, has been a powerful force in galvanizing 
this movement.

Hopkins says we must quickly make our communities more resilient, less 
vulnerable to the profound changes that are coming, because we’re learning 
that resilient communities—“self-reliant for the greatest possible number of 
their needs—will be infinitely better prepared than those who are dependent 
on globalized systems for food, energy, transportation, health, and housing.”

The essence of resilience is relocalization, which means moving steadily in 
the direction of local production of food, energy and goods; local 
development of currency, government and culture; reducing consumption while 
improving environmental and social conditions; and developing exemplary 
communities that can be working models for other communities when the effects 
of energy decline become more intense.

In May 2008, our organization became the first officially recognized 
Transition Initiative in the U.S.—and the first in North America, for that 
matter. By that time, we had already for three years been working towards 
relocalization in Boulder County.

The movement in the U.S. has grown significantly, and as of today there are 
58 officially recognized Transition Initiatives in the U.S., five of them 
here in Colorado.

Meanwhile, we have become a statewide hub to catalyze, inspire, train and 
support the adoption of the Transition process in communities across the 
state (some 20 initiatives are already under way in Colorado).

Nearly everywhere that Transition is getting traction, we’re all working on 
the relocalization of food and farming, the rebuilding of our local food 
systems, our local foodsheds.

After the Transition Handbook, the first book published by the Transition 
Network was Local Food: How to Make it Happen in Your Community. It‘s an 
inspirational and very practical guide for rebuilding a diverse, resilient 
local food network, drawing on the experience of dozens of Transition 
initiatives and other community projects around the world.

Rob Hopkins and his co-author set the tone for Local Food early on in the 
book. They say:

    “…By collectively demystifying the contents of the global pantry and by 
sourcing, growing and producing food independently of centralized, fragile 
and detrimental food trades, we are rediscovering our own worth as community 
members—people capable of interacting with and shaping the food landscapes 
around us… We are bringing our food culture home because we have to. And 
while we know we can’t move mountains, we are remembering that we can plant 
seeds.”

     Bringing It Home

Let’s bring it back home to the state of Colorado.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2006 we Coloradans spent 
nearly $10 billion on food per year—$9.5 billion, $5.4 of which was food to 
eat at home (we eat out a lot).

97% of food consumed in Colorado is imported from outside the state. Very 
little of what we consume is organic.

Nearly $2 billion of our 2006 food budget for home consumption was on meat 
and dairy products, more than a third of the total. (Since that time, our 
meat consumption has of course increased.)

In Boulder County alone, we spent more than $660 million on food in 2006, 
almost all of which went outside the local economy.

If we could increase our local food purchases, particularly organic food, 
this would not only have profound benefits on our health and greatly reduce 
our contribution to global warming, but would also greatly boost our local 
economies.

I think we’re severely underestimating the economic power of local organic 
farming. This is part of what we’re thinking about in relocalizing food and 
farming.

To be sustaining and sustainable, agriculture must make the transition from 
an oil-based industrial model to a more labor-intensive, knowledge-intensive, 
localized, organic model. This means a radical reduction of fossil fuel 
inputs, accompanied by an increase in labor inputs and a reduction of 
transport, with production being devoted primarily to local consumption.

A key strategy for building a resilient food and farming system is 
relocalization. It’s not the only answer, but it’s a powerful step forward. 
Other strategies include: converting farms to powering with renewable energy; 
increasing soil fertility through crop rotation, recycling nutrients, natural 
fertilizers; shifting consumers to local, seasonal diet; switching to diverse 
multi-enterprise farming systems; adopting organic and biointensive methods 
of farming; shifting to labor-intensive methods; increasing the number of 
farmers; seed-saving; rebuilding local processing and distribution systems.

     Permaculture and the Transition

As it happens, the entire Transition process of relocalization is based on a 
deep understanding of a particular form of agriculture—called Permaculture, 
which you’ve now heard me mention several times.

So what’s Permaculture? It’s a contraction of two words, permanent and 
agriculture. It’s really about permanent or sustainable agriculture.

As Wendell Berry says, “A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes 
neither the people nor the land.”

You could say that Permaculture is the art of making it possible for humans 
to live in harmony with the Earth, with the biosphere, and with each other.

Essentially, Permaculture is a design approach based on a deep understanding 
of the principles of how living systems naturally work; it shows us how to 
design and build (and rebuild) human systems based on those same living 
systems, and to do that in such a way that sustains human life and the life 
of the biosphere.

Permaculture shows us how to restore the balance between human life and the 
biosphere, which as we now know has gotten wildly out of balance.

Permaculture was first developed in the early ‘70s, by Bill Mollison and 
David Holmgren in Australia, largely in response to the oil crisis of that 
era, drawing upon indigenous wisdom from all over the world. Now it’s being 
practiced by farmers small and large, tens of thousands of them, around the 
globe. And all of those practitioners together have been evolving an enormous 
body of knowledge and experience that I believe is going to be extremely 
important to all of us in the coming years.

As many of you may know, when in 1990 Cuba’s supply of oil was cut off almost 
overnight with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the Permaculturists 
who stepped forward to completely transform that country’s agricultural 
system to feed its people. They demonstrated how farming could be done on a 
large scale without fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizers. They converted 
the nation to an 80% organic, mostly vegetarian diet in 18 months. Urban 
gardens there now produce 50% of the nation’s produce.

There’s a powerful documentary film about this, “The Power of Community: How 
Cuba Survived Peak Oil.” Significantly, to make the rapid transition from 
fossil-fueled agriculture, Cuba involved 15 – 25% of its population in food 
production.

When we started our relocalization work in Boulder in 2005, we could only 
find two people who were teaching Permaculture. Now there are at least 32 
Permaculture teachers in the county, who are training scores of new 
practitioners every year. How many people in this room have taken a 
Permaculture course? Get to know a Permaculturist!

     Designing the Transition (Boulder County Case Study)

In Boulder County, we’ve been asking, “What will it take to build a 
resilient, sustainable, localized food system? What will replace industrial 
agriculture?”

Here’s some of what we think it’s going to take: more Open Space acreage 
devoted to crops for food (not fuel or silage); more farms producing food; 
more biointensive, organic food production; more farmers (a lot more); more 
CSAs; more/bigger farmers’ markets; more local infrastructure for storage, 
distribution, and preservation; more local financial resources; more 
education and training; more backyard and frontyard gardening; more community 
greenhouses; more commitment by our communities to bring new awareness, 
energy, and vitality to the local food system, promoting closer connections 
between members of the community and those who grow our food

In short, we know we need to relocalize our local foodshed, and begin acting 
as if that local foodshed is just as important as our local watershed.

But how could a grassroots, community-based movement possibly help to 
accomplish all this?

Well, one of the principles of relocalization—and Permaculture—is that you 
begin in your own back yard. And a lot of people are doing just that. I love 
the story of Boulder’s Kipp Nash, a city-bound school bus driver who so 
desperately wanted to be a farmer that he finally began persuading his 
suburban neighbors to let him plow up their yards to grow vegetables.

I think it’s fair to say that he had no idea what he was getting into. He now 
has a thriving neighborhood CSA—he calls it an “NSA,” neighborhood supported 
agriculture—and has been selling produce at the Boulder Farmers Market. He’s 
a real farmer now, all right—an urban farmer, with all the challenges that 
rural farmers face. And what he’s doing is contagious. Transition Louisville, 
for instance, is implementing the same model in their community with a series 
of “urban farms.”

And hundreds of other people in the area are learning to grow some of their 
own food, from renting small plots in a community garden, to plowing up their 
yards and sheet-mulching on an ambitious scale, to raising chickens. Now, we 
might be slightly amused by all of this, as we witness a whole lot of people 
suddenly taking up gardening. But there’s something far deeper going on here.

Municipalities such as Longmont and Greeley have had to change local laws 
recently to accommodate growing public demand to be able to raise chickens. 
And arcane water laws are being challenged as more and more people are 
learning that they could greatly reduce their water consumption for backyard 
and frontyard food production by catching and storing water. “Illegal!?” they 
say. “It’s what makes the most sense!”

Also, we’ve got the likes of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Joel 
Salatin, Wes Jackson, Richard Heinberg, Sharon Astyk, and a host of other 
authors and documentary filmmakers working hard to change the way we all 
think about food and agriculture, and the way we eat and the way we grow our 
food.

And we’ve got local people like Ann Cooper who is determined to bring 
healthy, organic, local food into school cafeterias throughout the Boulder 
Valley School District, and others who are working to infiltrate other 
institutions like our hospitals and corporate cafeterias.

And we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of restaurants who are serving 
truly local food—more than 70 that we’ve identified in Boulder County so far, 
probably a ten-times increase from 2006. More and more chefs and 
restaurateurs are building gardens, and some of them are actually investing 
in farms.

We’ve also seen an enormous increase in the number of CSA subscriptions in 
Boulder County. Nobody knows the number today, but when we started in 2006 we 
could identify only about 150 available CSA subscriptions. Now we have 
individual farms in the county that have more than 300 CSA subscribers, and 
Grant Family Farms is going for thousands of subscribers. This is a big 
change! I think we could call that exponential growth.

Meanwhile, farmers markets are growing and multiplying…

A local food system gets built from the ground up, starting at the grassroots 
level. All of us have something to contribute to this process, and our skills 
and knowledge and passion are very much needed now—for the current realities 
are sobering:

Approximately 34,000 people in Boulder County are food insecure (don’t know 
where next meal will come from). That’s almost 12% of the county population. 
As energy prices increase and the economy slides, more will join their ranks.

In 2006, our food working group calculated that with the current food and 
agriculture system, we could feed only about 20,000 people in Boulder County.

Then they looked at the upside. They estimated that with greatly expanded 
individual and community plots, greatly increased farming for food, 
bio-intensive methods, reduced calorie intake and simplified diet—basically, 
doing everything we could think of to increase local food production—this 
maybe could be increased to ~185,000 people.

But the Boulder County population is 300,000 people. So we know that we’re 
vulnerable, like most communities. (We heard from a farmer recently that an 
entire season’s sales at the Boulder Farmers’ Market would only feed Boulder 
County for half a day!)

     EAT LOCAL! Campaign

So, at Transition Colorado, right now we’re focusing both on expanding the 
market for local consumption and rebuilding our local food production 
capacity in Boulder County. It’s a kind of classic chicken-and-egg challenge, 
for we certainly can’t have one without the other. So we’re trying to build 
both at the same time.

On the market side, we’ve launched a public education and awareness campaign 
under the theme of EAT LOCAL!

A key strategy in this is our EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide and Directory, now in 
its second edition, published just a couple of weeks ago with 10,000 copies 
being distributed throughout the county. Copies are available here in the 
back of the room (please take several and share with others).

This is all supported by a rapidly-growing and continually-updated website 
(www.EatLocalGuide.com).

Through the Guide, and throughout the EAT LOCAL! Campaign, we’re explaining 
why eating local is so important, and connecting people with all the 
available sources in the county in a comprehensive directory so they can find 
what they’re looking for—whether it’s local food producers, or local food 
supporters. This directory is online, too.

But giving people the reasons and the sources isn’t enough. So we’re helping 
to provide some incentive, through a 10% Local Food Shift Challenge and 
Pledge.

And we’re showing people some of the many things they can do to increase 
their local food consumption and help support local agriculture.

We’re also helping people learn new skills, because shifting to lower-carbon, 
mixed-farming organic systems that are less dependent on oil and chemicals 
will require a lot more people with the right skills working on the land 
again. So we’ve launched an ambitious Reskilling program—providing 
instruction in the basic practical life skills we have largely lost, from 
growing, cooking and canning food, to permaculture design courses. We’ve 
delivered about 10,000 people hours of Great Reskilling instruction in the 
last two years.

At the same time, besides driving the market for local food, we’re working to 
help increase local food production capacity by:

    * Getting people to see local organic agriculture as economic development.
    * Encouraging people, especially youth, to consider farming as a viable 
and sustainable career choice.
    * Training people in food production, especially Permaculture.
    * Helping to organize and support a Boulder County Farmer Cultivation 
Center.
    * Working with the Boulder County Food and Agriculture Policy Council and 
the Parks and Open Space Department to find ways to convert much of the 
county’s 17,000 acres of open space ag land to food production for local 
consumption, and to develop or change policies to support and encourage local 
agriculture.
    * Working with county and municipal governments as they reconsider their 
comprehensive plans and land use policies, to ensure that local food and 
agriculture are supported by those plans and policies.
    * Working with Slow Money, the massive capital pool being organized by 
Woody Tasch, an effort to direct local capital into financing local food and 
farming enterprises.
    * Working with local entrepreneurs to exploit new opportunities that are 
emerging as we seek to rebuild local infrastructure of distribution, storage, 
processing, and marketing.
    * Working with companies like Farmland LP and organizations like Post 
Carbon Institute, who are developing a far-reaching program of buying 
conventional farmland and converting it to organic food production as a 
significant investment opportunity.
    * Collaborating with Everybody Eats! and other stakeholders to cultivate 
a county-wide coalition of governmental and non-governmental agencies, 
farmers, businesses and individuals to plan and implement a local food and 
farming system. Call it a local foodshed alliance, if you will.

All this is a massive process that’s going to take some time. Transition 
suggests a systematic approach that we’re doing our best to follow. But we’re 
not in control of the process. The community itself is. We’re acting 
primarily as a catalyst for collaboration, and as a provider of information, 
insight, and inspiration. It’s an experiment, and as Rob Hopkins says in his 
“cheerful disclaimer”: We really don’t know if it’s going to work. But we do 
know that if we wait for the governments or big industry, it’ll be too little 
too late. And if we just act as individuals, changing our lifestyles, it’ll 
surely be too little. But if we act together, as communities, it might be 
just enough just in time!

     Conclusion

Clearly, the food and agricultural revolution is already getting underway. 
Fundamentally, it’s not about simply about lifestyle choices or mere 
differences in values. It’s arising in response to a growing predicament that 
is at the heart of our industrial agriculture system and the heart of our 
globalized economy.

This transition is coming whether we like it or not, whether we’re ready or 
not.

I know there’s a lot of controversy around all this, and a lot of emotions. I 
suspect a lot of dust is going to get kicked up along the way.

Much of the debate seems to hinge around the goals of sustainability 
seemingly interfering with farmers’ and industry’s goals of profitability. 
But sustainable agriculture must of course include economic viability. And 
that doesn’t necessarily mean “big.”

We sometimes hear “small farming” used as a pejorative term. Small organic 
farmers often get pigeonholed and tossed aside as a probable relic of the 
past.

But at the 19th annual Farming for the Future conference in Pennsylvania 
earlier this month, Bryan Snyder, the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania 
Association for Sustainable Agriculture said something very significant, and 
I want to close with his words. He said:

    “People like to hear about lots of acres or large numbers of animals and 
bushels of corn per acre measured in the hundreds. But models of farming that 
can gross $50,000 to $100,000 on a single acre—or CSA programs that, in some 
cases and on relatively small acreage, are able to count their customers in 
the thousands and bank $1 million or more in the spring before even planting 
a seed—are anything but small!”

Snyder’s conclusion is exactly what we have come to at Transition Colorado:

    “We must encourage everyone, wherever they are and as a priority, to eat 
food produced as near to their own homes as possible. Secondly, feed thy 
neighbor as thyself. From this perspective, local food not only can feed the 
world, it may be the only way to ever feed the world in a healthy and just 
manner.”


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Michael BrownleeMICHAEL BROWNLEE is co-founder of Transition Colorado 
(formerly Transition Boulder County), and a long-time catalyst for 
relocalization. A founding member of the Boulder County Food and Agriculture 
Policy Council, he is also a board member of Transition U.S. and a certified 
Transition Trainer. His organization has helped birth more than 20 Transition 
Initiatives in Colorado. Michael is also editor and publisher of Transition 
Times, a newly-launched online publication providing information, insight and 
inspiration for The Long Emergency.

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